Kremlin lobs another shot at marketplace of ideas

The proverbial canary in the mineshaft of Russia's ongoing democratic experiment may well be Yury Levada, a pioneering sociologist whose roller-coaster career has tracked the political vicissitudes of the past 50 years here.

Fired from his academic job under Leonid Brezhnev, reinstated by reforming Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, Mr. Levada has lately been showing signs of distress under the presidency of Vladimir Putin.

In early September, employing a Soviet-era technicality, the Russian government took control of the independent All-Russian Center for Public Opinion and Market Research (VTsIOM), founded and until last month headed by Levada, and replaced its governing board of professional sociologists with officials from the Kremlin and various state ministries.

After VTsIOM's management was forcibly changed, Levada and his entire staff of 100 abandoned the offices and equipment they had used for 15 years and set up a new private polling agency, which they named VTsIOM-A.

"I've always just tried to do my job," says Levada, a jovial, white-haired bear of a man. "Sometimes I notice that someone doesn't like it. Just now, I can see they don't like it."

Critics warn that the attempt to put Levada out of business is part of a larger Putin-era pattern, which Kremlin theorists call "managed democracy."

The idea is to maintain outward democratic forms, while ensuring that those in power are not actually challenged by serious opposition or trenchant criticism. Over the past three years all independent Russian TV networks have been taken over by Kremlin-friendly companies and the rest of the press straitjacketed by tough new laws and a pervasive culture of self-censorship.

"The security sweep that has already cleaned up the media is being extended into sociology," says Andrei Piontkovsky, director of the independent Center for Strategic Studies in Moscow. "It's obvious that the aim of the operation was to get rid of Levada."